Fathia obtained a PhD in immunology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1984. After a 3-year post-doctoral training at NIH, Bethesda, USA, she was recruited to INSERM to continue her research at Gustave Roussy Institute.
During her career, she was initially interested by murine B lymphocytes and then human T lymphocytes and their receptors. Since 1996, she has directed her research toward tumor immunology and immunotherapy.
She has contributed to the identification of tumor-associated antigens in lung cancer that are recognized by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and has helped elucidating the mechanisms involved in optimizing the anti-tumor CTL response.